Stacks of history
Book expert Stuart Kells has too many stories in his study of libraries.
It’s something of an irony, given the role of libraries as enduring storehouses of information, that much of what we know about the early ones comes from the stories of their destruction.
This comprehensive if discursive history notes that the destruction of books, a perennial symbol of barbarism, has long been a weapon of war: the Romans looted the Macedonian royal library in 168BC; the Goths’ sacking of Rome 600 years later included large-scale pillage of manuscripts; the Vikings stole the Saxons’, the Mongols the Koreans’ and Portuguese Christians “wreaked havoc in the libraries of Buddhist Ceylon”.
The race to save the Arabic manuscripts in Timbuktu from Al Qaeda has inspired several documentaries and two books in two years. The sickening history of book plunder underlines a sense that it damages not just the patrimony of single cultures, but the very notion of heritage itself.
The author’s name, like that of a butcher called Cleaver, or a swaggering bully called Trump, is apt to his profession: he is a book-trade historian and the 1200-year-old Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of the Gospels, is a glittering testimony to the art and science of librarianship. Penguin and the Lane Brothers, his 2015 “counterhistory” of the famous publisher, was widely praised, but this book is hampered by the fact that it tries to tell so many stories at once.
Reading it is like browsing in a bookshop or library, which is perhaps not an inappropriate experience, but too often it feels as if we are reduced to reading the spines rather than the pages.
Long lists of events or (oftenunexplained) terms can pall: the information that St Gall’s abbey library in Switzerland is rich in a score of items including “herbals, breviaries, evangialiaries, anti-phonaries [and] festschrifts” may dazzle more than it illuminates. Only rarely does Kells yield to the poetic or even magical potential of his subject. And often he runs up narrative side roads (the history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings) and gets lost. Indeed as much of the book is about books as it is about libraries.
The omission of illustrations is, perhaps, understandable, since imagery – of the Beinecke Library at Yale, say, or the remarkable “fore-edge painting” that appears when the gilt edges of books are fanned – is so easily accessed online. More regrettable is the absence of index, bibliography and annotation – incomprehensible in a book about information storage and retrieval. Worse, quotation marks appear frequently around passages whose source is never given.
Where the book is most entertaining is in the small interpolations between chapters that seize on the marginalia of its story: the dating of books by their smell; the ravages of real, not metaphorical, bookworms and other library fauna; and the single-minded passion that books evoke.
When the 15th-century philologist Guillaume Budé was interrupted at his reading by a servant telling him that the house was on fire, he replied, “Tell my wife that I never interfere with the household”, and returned to his book.
Only rarely does Kells yield to the poetic or even magical potential of his subject.